While the news related to the estimated graphics chip shipments was disappointing year-to-year, the news was encouraging quarter-to-quarter. According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), AMD overall unit shipments increased 10.9%, quarter-to-quarter, Intel increased 6.2%, and Nvidia decreased by 8%.

The overall PC market declined 2.5% quarter-to-quarter while the graphics market increased 4.6%. Overall this net 7.1% increase reflects an interest on the part of consumers for double-attach?the adding of a discrete GPU to a system with integrated processor graphics, and to a lesser extent dual AIBs in performance desktop machines.

On a year-to-year basis we found that total graphics shipments during Q2?13 dropped 6.8% while PC shipments which declined by at a faster rate of 11.2% overall. GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped and most of the PC vendors are guiding down to flat for Q3?13.

The popularity of tablets and the persistent economic slowness are the most often mentioned reasons for the decline in the PC market and the CAGR for PC graphics from 2012 to 2016 is -1.4%; we expect the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 to be 319 million units.

The ten-year average change for graphics shipments for quarter-to-quarter is a growth of 7.2%. This quarter is below the average with a 4.6% increase.

JPR's findings include discrete and integrated graphics (CPU and chipset) for Desktops, Notebooks (and Netbooks), and PC-based commercial (i.e., POS) and industrial/scientific and embedded. This report does not include handhelds (i.e., mobile phones), x86 Servers or ARM-based Tablets (i.e. iPad and Android-based Tablets), Smartbooks, or ARM-based Servers. It does include x86-based tablets.

- Total discrete GPUs (desktop and notebook) were down 5.5% from the last quarter and were down 5.2% from last year for the same quarter due to the same problems plaguing the overall PC industry. Overall the trend for discrete GPUs is up with a CAGR to 2016 of -2.2%.